Way back in 2006, my second release as a self-produced recording artist was a four-song EP of original songs called That Time of Year. If you’re interested in the story behind that EP, you can read all about it in a November 2006 blog entry (originally published on Myspace!).
I’ve always felt the songs on that EP have held up well. In fact, I perform songs from the EP each year during the holiday season, and one of those songs, “The Day After the Day After Christmas”, is one of my most-requested songs on the live front. My recording and mixing skills have come a long way since those early releases, though. As a result, I’d been considering remixing or remaking the songs from That Time of Year for a few years now. Somehow, though, schedules and priorities never ended up working out.
An Opportunity Arises
Cut to earlier this year, and I came across a call for Christmas songs to be pitched to major label country artists. That got me thinking maybe I could remix some stripped-down versions of some of my Christmas songs to pitch. There were three specific songs I was considering, including “It Started in a Manger” and “The Day After the Day After Christmas” from That Time of Year and “Cuddling on Christmas Eve”, a newer song I’d written and released as a single in 2021.
My idea for “It Started in a Manger” was to remake the recording, trying to approximate an acoustic ballad-style arrangement I’d made for early song demos that had resulted in the song’s being recorded by other artists (The Altarmen & Julie in 1998 and Lana Kress in 1998) prior to my own recording of the song. I’d taken my version of the song in a more rock-flavored direction, initially for a multi-artist charity album, Ho Ho Ho Spice, on Volunteer Records in 2002, then later, in a remixed form, for That Time of Year in 2006. I decided I’d leave this song for last on the song demo opportunity for the simple reason that I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to make a new recording, and I wanted to at least get one or both of the other recordings done in time to make the pitch deadline. In short, I barely got the others together in time, so I didn’t even start on remaking “It Started in a Manger” for the opportunity, and I ended up diverting to other projects once the deadline for that opportunity had passed.
As for the other two songs, the arrangement of “The Day After the Day After Christmas” was in the ballpark of what I felt would fit the opportunity, so I was just trying to (very quickly) make a better mix of the recording, upgrading some of the instrument sounds and the mix itself. While that mix wasn’t something I’d have released as a master recording, it was an improvement on the 2006 mix from the EP. I was sufficiently encouraged by the difference in mix quality that I again started thinking about the possibility of remixing the That Time of Year EP for a new release.
For “Cuddling on Christmas Eve”, I wanted to strip out the orchestral tracks from the single’s mix as they made it much more like a classic crooner song than something I felt could work for country. Here, too, I made a quick remix, changing some of the instrument sounds for a better country fit (at least in my mind). It wasn’t something I’d have put out as is for a release, but it worked as a song demo. While the song wasn’t on the original That Time of Year EP, I’d always considered adding it as an extra should I remake the EP.
I didn’t get anywhere with the song demo pitches. The reviewer didn’t seem to quite get the point of the late Christmas celebration in “The Day After the Day After Christmas” and felt “Cuddling on Christmas Eve” would be great for a classic crooner song but wasn’t a fit for country. This was in early July.
Time and Distance
During the summer months, I ended up working on a couple of recordings that ended up taking way longer than I’d been hoping, or even expecting, they might. This partly related to my making a significant adjustment to certain of my mixing techniques after trying out a couple of new audio plugins on the first of those recordings. I ended up deciding I wanted to go back to square one on mixing that recording to incorporate those plugins. I’m by no means a speedy mixer, and I’ll often go through anywhere from a half dozen to a dozen mix iterations to get to a final mix. In that first case (“The Real Truth (N.O.Y.B.”), though, the final mix ended up being the twenty-eighth iteration. By comparison, the second (“Can’t Give Up the Love”) only needed nine mixes.
That second project was unique in that I was starting with tracks from an old demo of the song, including using all the vocals from that demo and starting with the MIDI data from the original instrumental tracks, though I’d rework them significantly in the course of producing the recording. That project took about two and a half weeks of elapsed time, and it turned out to be an interesting test case for the idea of remixing the tracks from the That Time of Year EP. In particular, the original tracks for “Can’t Give Up the Love” were produced in Cakewalk SONAR, over a dozen years ago. I’ve been working in Steinberg Cubase Pro for a number of years now, and I wanted to produce the new recording in Cubase. Thus, an initial challenge was figuring out how best to transfer what I could from the SONAR demo project into Cubase as a starting point for further work. I also knew some of the software instruments I’d used on the original project might no longer be available. Even if they were, I might want to replace them with higher quality, more modern alternatives. Those alternatives might respond differently than the original instruments, which would mean more work in editing and/or overdubbing expressive controls. Even on the tracks where I used the audio (only the vocals on that recording), I needed to do some restoration work to deal with artifacts in the original recordings.
The net is that the “Can’t Give Up the Love” project served as a sort of proof of concept for the EP remixes. However, it also took long enough that time would be extremely tight if I was going to finish all the remixes in time for a holiday season release. I’d have to move a good deal more quickly on the remixes for the EP.
Getting Down to Business
I started on the EP remix project on October 9th, beginning with “It Started in a Manger”. The date on the original SONAR project was November 11, 2006 — almost eighteen years ago. The project would likely have been created in SONAR 5 or 6 running on 32-bit Windows XP — ancient stuff. While the current Cakewalk by BandLab (CbB) can read those old projects, it hung opening this one, almost certainly due to ancient plugins that don’t work properly on the CbB software on 64-bit Windows 10. That was a minor road bump in that CbB can open projects in a safe mode that disables plugins, either selectively or in total, at the cost of not being able review settings used within those plugins. However, it gave an early idea of the type of complications that would arise in starting these remixes.
I finished that first remix on October 19th. On the bright side, it took about a week less than the “Can’t Give Up the Love” proof of concept. However, at that pace, I wouldn’t finish the remixes in time for a 2024 holiday season release.
While I knew time would be tight, finishing that mix made me feel all the more committed to finishing the revised EP project in time to put it out this year. I was originally thinking about a Black Friday release of the EP, but I knew I’d be unlikely to make that. Thus, I decided to put a stake in the ground by putting the remix of “It Started in a Manger” out as a single on Black Friday, with the EP to follow as soon as practical thereafter. My fervent hope was that would mean the first Friday in December.
Diversions
Backtracking a little, just before I began remixing “It Started in a Manger”, and during the first few days I was working on that track, I had a couple of interruptions relating to potential live music opportunities. One of those took a bit of focus for a few days of elapsed time, but didn’t end up amounting to anything.
The second opportunity, however, resulted in a one-off, 3-hour gig that would pay pretty well, but would also require a significant amount of preparation. I’d never heard, no less played with, the band involved, and there would be no rehearsals. Most of the songs were 90s country songs I’d been familiar with “back in the day”, at least as a listener. Now I’d need to make charts and learn to play those three hours’ worth of songs in the space of about a little over a week. There may have been a bit of stress involved.
The virtual Adobe MAX conference, which I’ve been attending the last few years, also took up two solid days within this same period. Nevertheless, I managed to finish the remix of “It Started in a Manger” four days after Adobe MAX ended and one day before the show. Whew!
Back to Work
After a taking a couple of days off to finish my show preparations and for the show itself, I started working on the second remix, “Molly’s Bar and Grill”, on October 21st. I finished it on the 27th, which was an improvement over both “Can’t Give Up the Love” and “It Started in a Manger”. It might have gone considerably more quickly had it not been for some strange whistling-type artifacts in the original lead vocal track. I tried everything I could think of to try to remove those using the audio restoration software I have at my disposal, but nothing I tried ended up sufficiently reducing the whistling without also introducing significant artifacts. In the end, much of the time I spent on that remix related to figuring out how best to make the tradeoffs in that area while also getting the vocal to sit well within the overall mix. While it only took me seven mixes to get to that point, there was a lot of time between mixes spent going back to the drawing board on vocal treatment strategies.
Next up was “Santa’s Best”, my tribute to Santa’s reindeer, which I started on October 27th and finished on November 4th. “Santa’s Best” is quite different from the other songs from the original EP. It makes heavy use of synth sounds, whereas the other tracks tend to revolve around more organic sounds. In a number of cases, I did not have access to the original virtual instruments. While that’s not a big deal with more traditional instrument sounds like piano, guitar, electric bass and drums, it was much more of a challenge with the synth sounds. In particular each synth in the original played a specific role on the sound front — for example, I’d labeled tracks with names like “French horn synth” and “marimba synth”, to give a feel for the character of the role the synth was playing, despite the actual sounds being nothing like the namesake instruments. My challenge here was to try to find synths and sounds, or create blends of multiple synths and sounds, that played the right role for each part, even if they might not sound exactly like the parts they were replacing. (While I might have been able to just use the audio tracks from the original recording for those instruments, a key point of the remix project was to dramatically improve the sound of the mixes, so I wanted to go back to basics.) There also happened to be a short-notice (same day) 3-hour gig, along with some other distractions while this remix was underway. The net is it took me a few days longer and a few more mixes than the previous remix, but at least I was now through three-quarters of the tracks from the original EP.
Finishing the Original Four Tracks
Though “The Day After the Day After Christmas” was (and is still) the first track on the EP, and I’d started on the work I’d need to do during that initial song demo exercise, I left that remix until last due to one specific complication. One of the things I liked least about the original EP’s recordings was the believability, or lack thereof, of the fiddle part on this song. While I’d put some effort into trying to improve upon that at the song demo stage, I really had not succeeded.
I knew if I tackled this song before I finished the other three tracks, I might end up taking forever chasing an unreachable goal, never getting to the other tracks in time to get the project out the door this year. However, if I had the other three tracks done first, I’d be all the more motivated to find some way to get this one done in time, even if that meant compromising and just making some “that’ll have to do” decisions.
I started on the remix of “The Day After the Day After Christmas” on November 5th, and it took me until the 11th to finish a mix I could live with. While not all of that time was spent addressing the fiddle issue, that challenge did consume a fair amount of the time I spent. I also altered the arrangement a bit to compensate. If you count the earlier song demo mix I’d made a few months earlier, which had addressed another pet peeve from the original EP mix (the sound of the accordion), I got to a final result in eight mixes.
A New(er) Song
I’d always intended that, if I remixed or remade the That Time of Year EP, I’d also like to extend it, adding at least one additional original Christmas song. Of course, until 2021, when I wrote “Cuddling on Christmas Eve”, I didn’t have any additional original Christmas songs. I had recorded a number of traditional Christmas carols, in a variety of styles ranging from a piano/vocal-plus-strings (and actually also a pure piano/vocal) version of “Away in a Manger” to a synth rock version of “The First Noel”, over the years, releasing those in 2014 on my What Child is This? album. While I’d also toyed with the idea of combining the songs from both releases into one larger album, it never felt like the songs or recordings would fit into a coherent album.
Since the only additional original Christmas song I have at this point is “Cuddling on Christmas Eve”, that was the obvious song to extend the EP. However, I wasn’t feeling like the recording on the 2021 single fit very well alongside the earlier recordings (or their remixes). In particular, the recording on the single featured orchestral tracks in sort of a classic Christmas song style, while the recordings on the EP were largely piano, guitar, drums, and bass, albeit with some different “flavor” instruments on different tracks.
Remembering my earlier attempt to strip the recording of “Cuddling on Christmas Eve” down for song demo purposes, I decided I should be able to come closer to making that song fit alongside the original four by starting from that stripped down version. The challenge there was to take the ingredients on that song demo version and get them to the point of having a releasable mix. This effort also included replacing elements that didn’t fit as well alongside the other tracks with elements that did (e.g. replacing an acoustic bass sound with a bass guitar sound). Luckily, I was able to do that in the space of approximately three days, coming up with the “Rewrapped Remix” version of that song.
Bonus Tracks
Adding the “rewrapped” remix of “Cuddling on Christmas Eve” extended the new EP beyond the original four tracks and kept to the “original Christmas songs” nature of that original EP. However, I was also wanting to include the original single mix of that song, for completeness I suppose. That presented a bit of a dilemma. If I added that original mix, there would be one track on the revised EP with orchestral elements on it. Of course, there would also be two versions of that one song on the EP. What to do?
While I’d also considered the idea of adding some or all of my Christmas carols recordings from 2014’s What Child is This? album, I didn’t want to dilute the revised EP, and the prominence of the original Christmas songs, that much. Besides, the musical styles were all over the map on that album, and that would make for an even more disjointed album than adding a single original song with orchestral elements.
Back in 2021, I’d also recorded and released an orchestral rock version of “O Come, All Ye Faithful”. While I debated on whether it would fit the revised EP, I ultimately decided to include it. This was partly for completeness. That is, between the revised EP and the What Child is This? album, all my Christmas recordings to date would be available in these collections. By including it, I could also break up the flow of tracks a bit by putting the orchestral Christmas carol after the last of the remixed originals, but before the original version of “Cuddling on Christmas Eve”. It would feel like more of an obvious “bonus track”, while also setting the stage for the orchestral version of “Cuddling on Christmas Eve”.
While I could conceivably have attempted remixes of both bonus tracks, I decided against that. For one thing, I didn’t feel it was necessary. My production quality hasn’t improved that much in the three years since recording those songs. Additionally, since I was thinking of them as bonus tracks, it also made sense that they would be somewhat different from the meat of the EP.
I did, however, decide to remaster both tracks so that areas like loudness would be more consistent with the rest of the tracks on the EP. That ended up being a very quick process, which I both started and finished on November 14th, within the space of a few hours.
Cover Art
Once the recordings were finished, and I did a bit of quality control on that front, for example listening to the entire EP straight through in various environments, including doing a car listening test, it was time to figure out what to do on the cover art front. Like the original EP’s recordings, its artwork hadn’t aged well vis-à-vis my more recent cover artwork.
I was very new to attempting to create cover art at the time. The artwork for That Time of Year, which I created in a low-end version of Adobe Photoshop that came with a scanner, was only my second cover. The first, for the original release of The Lord’s Prayer, was based on one of my photographs, so I only needed to add text. For That Time of Year, though, I didn’t have any photographs that felt like they worked, and I was working on the artwork long before it was time to put up a Christmas tree. I decided I’d try to create something from scratch by “painting” (with a mouse) in Photoshop. My mouse-painting skills (and, for that matter, my painting skills of any sort) leave a lot to be desired, and my attempt to create a Christmas tree was fairly lame. However, after adding some texture to it, it at least reminded me (somewhat) of a type of homemade Christmas tree we made out of felt back when I was in Cub Scouts during elementary school.
As for the rest of that cover, I used a plain red background, with another texture applied, trying to make it look like some kind of cloth. Then I got a bit carried away with Photoshop’s layer effects to create the textual elements. I particularly thought the one for the EP’s title was kind of cool — it was somewhat translucent and reminded me of either a certain type of hard candy or some sort of semi-transparent material that I could imagine being used on some Christmas tree decorations. While I can see all the detail when I view that cover in a computer screen-filling size, the texture of the red background just gets lost at the smaller sort of size you’d see on a typical music streaming site. Even at the size of a physical CD, you have to look really close to see the texture. The title doesn’t exactly stand out enough in front of the Christmas tree “art”, either. In short, I knew I could do better these eighteen years later.
While I’d considered entirely redesigning the cover this time out, because the new version was primarily meant to remix the original recordings, while also adding newer recordings, I decided I wanted to reference the original cover art somehow. The “rewrapped” part of the title gave me the idea to do something that involved wrapping paper. I eventually decided to make a wrapping paper background (with some help from Adobe’s Firefly generative AI inside modern Photoshop) but use the Christmas tree “art” from the original cover to reference the original cover. I did some additional processing to enhance the latter part somewhat, and I shrunk it down to allow room for title text that wouldn’t have to overlap the Christmas tree.
Cover art generally takes me anywhere from a day or two to quite a bit longer, but this project went remarkably quickly, taking only a few hours, allowing me to submit the release for distribution on November 14th, thus easily making my target release date of the first Friday in December.
Wrapping Up
Getting the EP into the digital distribution cycle, to make it available on the music streaming sites where most people listen to music these days, was the most pressing, time-sensitive deadline for the project. There was still a good deal more work to be done, though, some of the necessary variety and some more elective. For example:
- Additional CD artwork: While I don’t make CDs of my albums and EPs available for purchase, I do create CD versions, which get manufactured by a CD-on-demand service, for two specific purposes. The first is to provide a physical copy of the release (i.e. EP in this case) to any cowriters involved in the process for their archives. This is mostly a courtesy nowadays given that digital music outlets don’t list all the relevant credit-type information. However, back when I first started licensing my songs to other artists, requiring physical copies was a necessity for copyright registration purposes, and I’d require the artists or record companies to provide the number of copies I needed for copyright registration deposits plus one per songwriter on the songs being licensed, and I’ve kept up the latter aspect, at least for cowritten songs I’m licensing for my own recordings, despite digital-only releases only needing digital files for copyright deposits. I also like to make a small number of CDs available for promotional uses should relevant needs arise.
- Admin: As a DIY (Do It Yourself) recording artist and songwriter, I am acting as both record company and music publisher for my recordings and songs, respectively. I won’t bore you with an extensive list of details, but just to give some sense, some of the activities involved include licensing cowritten songs, registering the new recordings of the songs with various royalty collection societies, updating my song catalog and royalty tracking database with relevant information to facilitate royalty reporting once “sales” (streaming and download) data starts coming in, and registering copyrights when applicable.
- Project archival: Once a recording is finished, I need to create archive files for various purposes, including the sort of need that allowed this EP remix project to happen at all (i.e. resurrecting various raw materials from the 2006 archive files from the original EP). In a project where I’m not facing a short deadline for the digital release, I’d typically prepare archive files for individual tracks each time I finish that recording. In this case, though, I didn’t want to take the time until I had the EP safely in the digital distribution cycle. Beyond archiving the underlying recording projects (Cubase Pro 13 projects in this case), I also created alternate mixes (e.g. karaoke and instrumental mixes), different audio file formats needed for different purposes, stems (i.e. submixes of various components such as drums, bass, guitars, keys, background vocals, and lead vocals, where these may be useful in scenarios where someone wants to be able to use the recording, for example in a TV show, but either without some components included at all or with the relative levels of some components altered in a mix), and unmastered mixes. On a project-level, or individual song-level, basis, there may also be non-audio files to include, such as artwork files (including the original Photoshop files), licensing paperwork, copyright registrations, etc. I’ve also gotten in the habit of documenting recording-specific “credits”, such as virtual instruments being used, any key preset information, etc. since I’ve learned from past remix experience, where I did not have this information available, that getting back to a starting point for a remix project can be challenging when, for example, older plugins are no longer available or don’t work in my current environment.
Getting all this put together for the That Time of Year Rewrapped project took another week of elapsed time, taking me through Thanksgiving.
Oh, and One More Thing
Because my primary reason for starting this project was to present the songs in a better light, hopefully finding ways to expose them to more people, I decided I should make lyric videos, at least for the five original songs (though I also ended up making one for my cover of “O Come, All Ye Faithful”).
While I more or less had a workflow template (at least in my mind) for creating the individual videos, and I got pretty efficient at making new ones after the first few were done, there was still unique work needed for each video. The songs obviously had different lyrics that would need to be entered and timed out to match up with the recordings, but I also decided I wanted to have unique background images for each video that somehow related to the specific song. In essence, creating each song’s background was similar in nature to a cover art project. I again took advantage of Adobe’s Firefly generative AI inside Photoshop to help me quickly come up with some raw ingredients for those background images (with the exception of the one for “O Come, All Ye Faithful”, where the image originated with a photo I took in Spain in 2006 that I’d also used as cover art from the original single), which I then tweaked further (sometimes with more AI assistance) to suit my sensibilities for the individual songs.
I spaced the video releases, and the work to create those videos, out between Thanksgiving weekend and Christmas Eve. You can listen to the full EP, while watching the lyric videos, in the YouTube playlist below. (The only track that doesn’t have a lyric video is the remastered version of the original “Cuddling on Christmas Eve single.)
I’d like to say this project is now fully complete, but I know there will be other things I think of that I’ll want to do at some point. Those will have to wait, though, because it’s now time to take a break for Christmas celebrations.
Merry Christmas!